Tenacious Sanctions

Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson and Representative Charles Vanik.How's this for old baggage: one of the topics Secretary of State Clinton is discussing with the Russians while in Vladivostok for the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting is whether the United States will lift the 1974-vintage trade sanction known as the Jackson-Vanik amendment. One of the coauthors of that legislation, Representative Charles Vanik, left Congress in in 1981. The other coauthor, Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, died in office in 1983. The Soviet Union, which was the obvious target of the legislation even though the law was worded in general terms, died over twenty years ago, although the sanctions have continued to apply to Russia as the successor state.

The original impetus for the legislation was opposition to restrictions the Soviets were placing on Jewish emigration in the 1970s. That situation changed long ago. Mikhail Gorbachev opened the doors for what would become large-scale emigration of Russian Jews in the 1990s. If the amendment has accomplished some other purpose related to human rights, it is hard to see what that is. The mark of a sanction that has succeeded is that it gets lifted.

Keeping Jackson-Vanik in place has at least potential economic costs to the United States. Although U.S. presidents have repeatedly issued waivers permitted under the law, keeping the law on the books violates rules of the World Trade Organization. Russia's accession to the WTO gives it the right to retaliate against U.S. business.

This baggage demonstrates how it is far harder to remove a sanction—either a special-purpose injunction such as Jackson-Vanik or placement on a list such as the one for state sponsors of terrorism—than to impose it in the first place. Imposition is usually a gesture of disapproval rather than a well-conceived tactic to elicit a change in behavior. Moreover, lifting of a sanction, regardless of changes in conditions that may justify lifting, gets perceived as making nice to the regime in question, and that can be a domestic political liability. As a result, sanctions that have already demonstrated their ineffectiveness get perpetuated; any disagreeable behavior by the targeted regime, even if it has little or nothing to do with the reason the sanction was imposed, is portrayed as a reason to keep the sanction in place.

Part of the domestic U.S. backdrop to any move on Jackson-Vanik is a draft bill in Congress that is critical of the human-rights situation in Russia and is named after Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who died after being imprisoned on allegedly trumped-up charges. President Obama opposes both the Magnitsky bill and the linking of it to trade. Mitt Romney supports the bill and says he would remove trade sanctions on Russia only if the bill were enacted. All of this is a perfect example of how domestic politics works to keep an obsolete sanction in place.

The difficulty in lifting whatever is imposed ought to be carefully considered before imposing any sanction. But of course the very political dynamics that make lifting difficult also tend to discourage taking that difficulty into account to begin with. There is no shortage of other examples besides the Jackson-Vanik amendment. Some of the oldest examples relate to Cuba. It also is a good bet that the sanctions being piled on Iran will make it difficult in the future to reset relations with Tehran, no matter what change there may be in Iranian policies and behavior. Don't expect even regime change to eliminate the problem; after all, there has been some regime change in Moscow since the 1970s.